If you’re hanging out feverishly to find out what happens after this weeks’ drama-filled season seven finale of Game of Thrones, you’re not alone – with the TV show now firmly ahead of the books, fans might have to wait until 2019 to see how George R.R. Martin’s epic saga wraps up.

So to give us some much-needed new material to over-analyse in the meantime, an algorithm has started to write the sixth book for us, and its predictions back up some long-held fan theories.

After feeding a type of AI known as a recurrent neural network the roughly 5,000 pages of Martin’s five previous books, software engineer Zack Thoutt has used the algorithm to predict what will happen next.

And it might be the best we get for a while, because, let’s face it, most of us are so sick of waiting that we’ve pretty much given up on Martin delivering The Winds of Winter anytime soon… even Martin himself.

But in addition to backing up what many of us already suspect will happen, the AI also introduces some fairly unexpected plot turns that we’re pretty sure aren’t going to be mirrored in either the TV show or Martin’s books, so we wouldn’t get too excited just yet.

For example, in the algorithm’s first chapter, written from Tyrion’s perspective, Sansa turns out to be a Baratheon:

“I feared Master Sansa, Ser,” Ser Jaime reminded her. “She Baratheon is one of the crossing. The second sons of your onion concubine.”

There’s also the introduction of a strange, pirate-like new character called Greenbeard.

“It’s obviously not perfect,” Thoutt told Sam Hill over at Motherboard. “It isn’t building a long-term story and the grammar isn’t perfect. But the network is able to learn the basics of the English language and structure of George R.R. Martin’s style on its own.”

Neural networks are a type of machine learning algorithm that are inspired by the human brain’s ability to not just memorise and follow instructions, but actually learn from past experiences.

A recurrent neural network is a specific subclass, which works best when it comes to processing long sequences of data, such as lengthy text from five previous books.

In theory, Thoutt’s algorithm should be able to create a true sequel to Martin’s existing work, based off things that have already happened in the novels.

But in practice, the writing is clumsy and, most of the time, nonsensical. And it also references characters that have already died:

It made Ned better stop until the fire was falling, standing beneath the arch of a shattered still distant field where the shadow tower paid the camp behind.

“A perfect model would take everything that has happened in the books into account and not write about characters being alive when they died two books ago,” Thoutt told Motherboard.

“The reality, though, is that the model isn’t good enough to do that. If the model were that good authors might be in trouble … but it makes a lot of mistakes because the technology to train a perfect text generator that can remember complex plots over millions of words doesn’t exist yet.”

One of the main limitations here is the fact that the books just don’t contain enough data for an algorithm.

Although anyone who’s read them will testify that they’re pretty damn long, they actually represent quite a small data set for a neural network to learn from.

But at the same time they contain a whole lot of unique words, nouns, and adjectives which aren’t reused, which makes it very hard for the neural network to learn patterns.

Thoutt told Hill that a better source would be a book 100 times longer, but with the level of vocabulary of a children’s book. Of course, though, that would defeat the purpose of the series we all know and love.

Still, these five, clumsy chapters are the best we’ve got while we sit around waiting for Martin to finally finish The Winds of Winter, or HBO to release the final season (our money’s on the latter happening first).

So for now we’re going to pore over them for any clues as to what’s going to happen next – who knows, maybe the algorithm has some ideas about how to take down an ice dragon…